Comment by andy12_

The difference between thinking and no-thinking models can be a little blurry. For example, when doing coding tasks Anthropic models with no-thinking mode tend to use a lot of comments to act as a scratchpad. In contrast, models in thinking mode don't do this because they don't need to.

Ultimately, the only real difference between no-thinking and thinking models is the amount of tokens used to reach the final answer. Whether those extra scratchpad tokens are between <think></think> tags or not doesn't really matter.